In this transnational seminar, students learn how to conduct and write up participant-observation research. The seminar addresses questions of both theory and practice, examining the contemporary practice of ethnographic research and writing across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including political and historical ethnography and memoir. The course contextualizes current approaches and debates in historical perspective, analyzing how contemporary ethnography departs from its colonial antecedents in both capitalist and state socialist contexts. We focus on ethical and practical questions in the practice of ethnographic research and writing, including accounting for positionality (how the ethnographer is situated in relation to the communities they study), implicit and explicit power relations, and questions of linguistic and cultural practices in the conduct and writing of ethnographic research. Students in the course will be expected to produce or propose a work of ethnography or auto-ethnography as their term project. The seminar will include participants from the New School for Social Research, Kharkiv Karazin University in Ukraine, and distinguished guests.